{"id":167,"date":"2007-01-18T20:38:16","date_gmt":"2007-01-19T00:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=167"},"modified":"2007-01-18T20:38:16","modified_gmt":"2007-01-19T00:38:16","slug":"will-iran-be-another-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Will Iran be another Iraq?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By George Allyene, newsday.co.tt<\/a>
\nJanuary 17 2007<\/i><\/p>\n

\"Iran\"Is the plan announced recently by the George Bush Administration to dispatch an additional 21,500 American troops to Iraq really an excuse for a United States military build up on the Iraq-Iran border and a prelude to a US invasion of Iran?<\/p>\n

It is understood that the real reason for the US 2003 invasion of Iraq was not that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but that it was being paid for its crude oil to the European Union (EU) in Euros and not in the traditional US dollars, and had been encouraging OPEC members to do the same. Is Iran\u2019s reported decision to follow Iraq\u2019s example and have its oil paid for in Euros the reason for the planned US troop boost?
\n
\nWhat effect will a United States invasion of Iran have, for example, on Trinidad and Tobago\u2019s proposed access to natural gas from the Venezuelan side of the cross-border gas reserves at the Manatee and Loran marine acreages, given Venezuela\u2019s declared support of Iran and that most of the additional liquefied natural gas which will be produced in Trinidad from these reserves will go to the United States? <\/p>\n

Additionally, this country\u2019s planned industrial expansion will depend, in large measure, on the availability of gas from the cross-border reserves. Indeed, in February of last year, Prime Minister Patrick Manning had expressed the hope that the gas from the cross-border natural gas reserves would soon be available \u201cfor the further development of industry in Trinidad and Tobago and the export of natural gas.\u201d <\/p>\n

The United States of America has insisted and the United Nations has tacitly agreed that Iran\u2019s current nuclear development strategy has been one of nuclear enrichment and not, as Iran has claimed, that its programme was aimed at establishing nuclear power plants to provide electricity. The United States has scores of nuclear power plants providing electricity, a situation that has become necessary because of the tremendous increase in the generation and consumption of electricity, a position not limited to the US, but rather is worldwide, even in crude oil and natural gas producing countries. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, only on Thursday the Chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joseph Biden, conjured up the spectre of a US violating Iran\u2019s sovereignty and insisted that Bush \u201cdid not have the authority to send US troops on cross-border raids.\u201d Of interest, though, is that US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, declared that the United States expected President Bush \u201cto do what is necessary to protect our forces.\u201d <\/p>\n

I had referred earlier to Venezuela\u2019s declared support for Iran. Only on Saturday, the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, flew in to Venezuela, significantly, to start a tour of several Latin American countries, and met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. However, news reports made it clear that officials had not provided any details of the discussions between the two presidents. <\/p>\n

From where I sit the Bush Administration, which had fed the American people and the world on a diet of \u201cfear\u201d, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, that Iraq had \u2018weapons of mass destruction\u2019 and the capability to reach several countries with those \u2018weapons\u2019, only to be proven shamelessly wrong, may be pulling a \u2018nuclear weapons\u2019 Anansi story on the American nation and US satellites with respect to Iran. This time, for good measure, it will, in all probability introduce the argument that Iranian troops are crossing the Iran-Iraq border to attack both Iranian and US military personnel. <\/p>\n

The problem facing the United States is not that there is any possibility that Iran would launch a nuclear strike on, for example, Israel, or would be inclined to do some nuclear rattling with respect to the Middle East, but that should Iran be able to succeed, where Iraq failed, in convincing other Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in accepting payment for their crude oil exports to the European Union in Euros instead of the present system of United States currency, this would harm the US economy. <\/p>\n

Admittedly, raw cane sugar supplied by the Caribbean to the European Union under the 1975 Convention of Lome has, since 1999, been paid for in Euros using the exchange rate for the US dollar. But the amount paid was and remains negligible in relation to that which Iraq would have been paid for its crude and which Iran is being paid as well today for its crude. <\/p>\n

The battle, then, is to prevent any ascendancy of the Euro over the US dollar as the principal unit of exchange. The US, clearly, feels it can not afford to lose and already the world has seen by its invasion of Iraq, in contravention of a United Nations ruling, what it may be prepared to do again.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.newsday.co.tt\/commentary\/0,50849.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By George Allyene, newsday.co.tt January 17 2007 Is the plan announced recently by the George Bush Administration to dispatch an additional 21,500 American troops to Iraq really an excuse for a United States military build up on the Iraq-Iran border and a prelude to a US invasion of Iran? It is understood that the real … Continue reading Will Iran be another Iraq?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}